The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (39 page)

He came riding up to them at a gallop, reached inside his shirt, and pulled out the
corvette
. “From Susan Delgado. She gave it to me in the upper market. She’s beautiful, and she’s also as wily as a snake. I say that with utmost admiration.”

Roland’s face filled with light and life. When Cuthbert tossed him the
corvette,
he caught it one-handed and pulled the lace-tie with his teeth. Inside, where a travelling man would have kept his few scraps of money, there was a single
folded piece of paper. Roland read this quickly, the light going out of his eyes, the smile fading off his mouth.

“What does it say?” Alain asked.

Roland handed it to him and then went back to looking out at the Drop. It wasn’t until he saw the very real desolation in his friend’s eyes that Cuthbert fully realized how far into Roland’s life—and hence into all their lives—Susan Delgado had come.

Alain handed him the note. It was only a single line, two sentences:

It’s best we don’t meet. I’m sorry.

Cuthbert read it twice, as if rereading might change it, then handed it back to Roland. Roland put the note back into the
corvette,
tied the lace, and then tucked the little purse into his own shirt.

Cuthbert hated silence worse than danger (it
was
danger, to his mind), but every conversational opening he tried in his mind seemed callow and unfeeling, given the look on his friend’s face. It was as if Roland had been poisoned. Cuthbert was disgusted at the thought of that lovely young girl bumping hips with the long and bony Mayor of Hambry, but the look on Roland’s face now called up stronger emotions. For that he could hate her.

At last Alain spoke up, almost timidly. “And now, Roland? Shall we have a hunt out there at the oilpatch without her?”

Cuthbert admired that. Upon first meeting him, many people dismissed Alain Johns as something of a dullard. That was very far from the truth. Now, in a diplomatic way Cuthbert could never have matched, he had pointed out that Roland’s unhappy first experience with love did not change their responsibilities.

And Roland responded, raising himself off the saddle-horn and sitting up straight. The strong golden light of that summer’s afternoon lit his face in harsh contrasts, and for a moment that face was haunted by the ghost of the man he would become. Cuthbert saw that ghost and shivered—not knowing what he saw, only knowing that it was awful.

“The Big Coffin Hunters,” he said. “Did you see them in town?”

“Jonas and Reynolds,” Cuthbert answered. “Still no sign of Depape. I think Jonas must have choked him and thrown him over the sea cliffs in a fit of pique after that night in the bar.”

Roland shook his head. “Jonas needs the men he trusts too much to waste them—he’s as far out on thin ice as we are. No, Depape’s just been sent off for awhile.”

“Sent where?” Alain asked.

“Where he’ll have to shit in the bushes and sleep in the rain if the weather’s bad.” Roland laughed shortly, without much humor. “Jonas has got Depape running our backtrail, more likely than not.”

Alain grunted softly, in surprise that wasn’t really surprise. Roland sat easily astride Rusher, looking out over the dreamy depths of land, at the grazing horses. With one hand he unconsciously rubbed the
corvette
he had tucked into his shirt. At last he looked around at them again.

“We’ll wait a bit longer,” he said. “Perhaps she’ll change her mind.”

“Roland—” Alain began, and his tone was deadly in its gentleness.

Roland raised his hands before Alain could go on. “Doubt me not, Alain—I speak as my father’s son.”

“All right.” Alain reached out and briefly gripped Roland’s shoulder. As for Cuthbert, he reserved judgment. Roland might or might not be acting as his father’s son; Cuthbert guessed that at this point Roland hardly knew his own mind at all.

“Do you remember what Cort used to say was the primary weakness of maggots such as us?” Roland asked with a trace of a smile.

“ ‘You run without consideration and fall in a hole,’ ” Alain quoted in a gruff imitation that made Cuthbert laugh aloud.

Roland’s smile broadened a touch. “Aye. They’re words I mean to remember, boys. I’ll not upset this cart in order to see what’s in it . . . not unless there’s no other choice. Susan may come around yet, given time to think. I believe she would have agreed to meet me already, if not for . . . other matters between us.”

He paused, and for a little while there was quiet among them.

“I wish our fathers hadn’t sent us,” Alain said at last . . . although it was
Roland’s
father who had sent them, and all three knew it. “We’re too young for matters such as these. Too young by years.”

“We did all right that night in the Rest,” Cuthbert said.

“That was training, not guile—and they didn’t take us seriously. That won’t happen again.”

“They wouldn’t have sent us—not my father, not yours—if they’d known what we’d find,” Roland said. “But now we’ve found it, and now we’re for it. Yes?”

Alain and Cuthbert nodded. They were for it, all right—there no longer seemed any doubt of that.

“In any case, it’s too late to worry about it now. We’ll wait and hope for Susan. I’d rather not go near Citgo without someone from Hambry who knows the lay of the place . . . but if Depape comes back, we’ll have to take our chance. God knows what he may find out, or what stories he may invent to please Jonas, or what Jonas may do after they palaver. There may be shooting.”

“After all this creeping around, I’d almost welcome it,” Cuthbert said.

“Will you send her another note, Will Dearborn?” Alain asked.

Roland thought about it. Cuthbert laid an interior bet with himself on which way Roland would go. And lost.

“No,” he said at last. “We’ll have to give her time, hard as that is. And hope her curiosity will bring her around.”

With that he turned Rusher toward the abandoned bunkhouse which now served them as home. Cuthbert and Alain followed.

Susan worked herself hard the rest of that Sanday, mucking out the stables, carrying water, washing down all the steps. Aunt Cord watched all this in silence, her expression one of mingled doubt and amazement. Susan cared not a bit for how her aunt looked—she wanted only to exhaust herself and avoid another sleepless night. It was over. Will would know it as well now, and that was to the good. Let done be done.

“Are ye daft, girl?” was all Aunt Cord asked her as Susan dumped her last pail of dirty rinse-water behind the kitchen. “It’s Sanday!”

“Not daft a bit,” she replied shortly, without looking around.

She accomplished the first half of her aim, going to bed
just after moonrise with tired arms, aching legs, and a throbbing back—but sleep still did not come. She lay in bed wide-eyed and unhappy. The hours passed, the moon set, and still Susan couldn’t sleep. She looked into the dark and wondered if there was any possibility, even the slightest, that her father had been murdered. To stop his mouth, to close his eyes.

Finally she reached the conclusion Roland had already come to: if there had been no attraction for her in those eyes of his, or the touch of his hands and lips, she would have agreed in a flash to the meeting he wanted. If only to set her troubled mind to rest.

At this realization, relief overspread her and she was able to sleep.

Late the next afternoon, while Roland and his friends were at fives in the Travellers’ Rest (cold beef sandwiches and gallons of white iced tea—not as good as that made by Deputy Dave’s wife, but not bad), Sheemie came in from outside, where he had been watering his flowers. He was wearing his pink
sombrera
and a wide grin. In one hand he held a little packet.

“Hello, there, you Little Coffin Hunters!” he cried cheerfully, and made a bow which was an amusingly good imitation of their own. Cuthbert particularly enjoyed seeing such a bow done in gardening sandals. “How be you? Well, I’m hoping, so I do!”

“Right as rainbarrels,” Cuthbert said, “but none of us enjoys being called Little Coffin Hunters, so maybe you could just play soft on that, all right?”

“Aye,” Sheemie said, as cheerful as ever. “Aye, Mr. Arthur Heath, good fella who saved my life!” He paused and looked puzzled for a moment, as if unable to remember why he had approached them in the first place. Then his eyes cleared, his grin shone out, and he held the packet out to Roland. “For you, Will Dearborn!”

“Really? What is it?”

“Seeds! So they are!”

“From you, Sheemie?”

“Oh, no.”

Roland took the packet—just an envelope which had been folded over and sealed. There was nothing written on the front or back, and the tips of his fingers felt no seeds within.

“Who from, then?”

“Can’t remember,” said Sheemie, who then cast his eyes aside. His brains had been stirred just enough, Roland reflected, so that he would never be unhappy for long, and would never be able to lie at all. Then his eyes, hopeful and timid, came back to Roland’s. “I remember what I was supposed to say to you, though.”

“Aye? Then say it, Sheemie.”

Speaking as one who recites a painfully memorized line, both proud and nervous, he said: “These are the seeds you scattered on the Drop.”

Roland’s eyes blazed so fiercely that Sheemie stumbled back a step. He gave his
sombrera
a quick tug, turned, and hurried back to the safety of his flowers. He liked Will Dearborn and Will’s friends (especially Mr. Arthur Heath, who sometimes said things that made Sheemie laugh fit to split), but in that moment he saw something in Will-sai’s eyes that frightened him badly. In that instant he understood that Will was as much a killer as the one in the cloak, or the one who had wanted Sheemie to lick his boots clean, or old white-haired Jonas with the trembly voice.

As bad as them, or even worse.

Roland slipped the “seed-packet” into his shirt and didn’t open it until the three of them were back on the porch of the Bar K. In the distance, the thinny grumbled, making their horses twitch their ears nervously.

“Well?” Cuthbert asked at last, unable to restrain himself any longer.

Roland took the envelope from inside his shirt, and tore it open. As he did, he reflected that Susan had known exactly what to say. To a nicety.

The others bent in, Alain from his left and Cuthbert from his right, as he unfolded the single scrap of paper. Again he saw her simple, neatly made writing, the message not much longer than the previous one. Very different in content, however.

There is an orange grove a mile off the road on the town side of Citgo. Meet me there at moonrise. Come alone. S.

And below that, printed in emphatic little letters:
BURN THIS
.

“We’ll keep a lookout,” Alain said.

Roland nodded. “Aye. But from a distance.”

Then he burned the note.

The orange grove was a neatly kept rectangle of about a dozen rows at the end of a partly overgrown cart-track. Roland arrived there after dark but still a good half hour before the rapidly thinning Peddler would haul himself over the horizon once more.

As the boy wandered along one of the rows, listening to the somehow skeletal sounds from the oilpatch to the north (squealing pistons, grinding gears, thudding driveshafts), he was struck by deep homesickness. It was the fragile fragrance of orange-blossoms—a bright runner laid over the darker stench of oil—that brought it on. This toy grove was nothing like the great apple orchards of New Canaan . . . except somehow it was. There was the same feeling of dignity and civilization here, of much time devoted to something not strictly necessary. And in this case, he suspected, not very useful, either. Oranges grown this far north of the warm latitudes were probably almost as sour as lemons. Still, when the breeze stirred the trees, the smell made him think of Gilead with bitter longing, and for the first time he considered the possibility that he might never see home again—that he had become as much a wanderer as old Peddler Moon in the sky.

He heard her, but not until she was almost on top of him—if she’d been an enemy instead of a friend, he might still have had time to draw and fire, but it would have been close. He was filled with admiration, and as he saw her face in the starlight, he felt his heart gladden.

She halted when he turned and merely looked at him, her hands linked before her at her waist in a way that was sweetly and unconsciously childlike. He took a step toward her and they came up in what he took for alarm. He stopped, confused. But he had misread her gesture in the chancy light. She
could have stopped then, but chose not to. She stepped toward him deliberately, a tall young woman in a split riding skirt and plain black boots. Her
sombrero
hung down on her back, against the bound rope of her hair.

“Will Dearborn, we are met both fair and ill,” she said in a trembling voice, and then he was kissing her; they burned against one another as the Peddler rose in the famine of its last quarter.

Inside her lonely hut high on the Cöos, Rhea sat at her kitchen table, bent over the glass the Big Coffin Hunters had brought her a month and a half ago. Her face was bathed in its pink glow, and no one would have mistaken it for the face of a girl any longer. She had extraordinary vitality, and it had carried her for many years (only the longest-lived residents of Hambry had any idea of how old Rhea of the Cöos actually was, and they only the vaguest), but the glass was finally sapping it—sucking it out of her as a vampire sucks blood. Behind her, the hut’s larger room was even dingier and more cluttered than usual. These days she had no time for even a pretense of cleaning; the glass ball took up all her time. When she wasn’t looking into it, she was
thinking
of looking into it . . . and, oh! Such things she had seen!

Ermot twined around one of her scrawny legs, hissing with agitation, but she barely noticed him. Instead she bent even closer into the ball’s poison pink glow, enchanted by what she saw there.

It was the girl who had come to her to be proved honest, and the young man she had seen the first time she’d looked into the ball. The one she had mistaken for a gunslinger, until she had realized his youth.